Antall József szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 64-65. (Budapest, 1972)

TANULMÁNYOK - Vida Mária: A Ráday könyvtár orvostörténeti jelentősége a XVIII. században

withdrew to his estate at Pécel with the intention to collect a large library possessing all published Hungarian works in addition to current and older foreign scientific and literary works. He had his son, Gedeon Ráday, educated abroad, first in Frankfurt a. Oder, then in Berlin. The son returned in 1733 and became a famous man of learning. Between 1756 and 1777 he had his father's mansion at Pécel reconstructed in late baroque style. The building included a six-room library. The architect was János Mayerhoffer, the son of a well-known master builder in Pest, András Mayerhoffer. Taking the most beautiful baroque castles of Hungary as his example (Gödöllő, Aszód, Tétény, etc.) Mayerhoffer built a U-shaped country residence. Unfortunately in 1825 it perished in a fire, but has since been restored in its original form. The ceiling of the large library hall was decorated with the figures of the gods representing the various disciplines: grammar, poetics, rhetoric, history, theology, law, mathematics, philosophy, and also medicine. It was the work of Mátyás Scherwitz, who also painted the frescoes of the "smaller library" showing the descent of Orpheus into the nether world. The collection of the books was systematical and well organized; foreign booksellers regularly sent their price-lists, agents were searching for books from Transylvania to Vienna, even noted scholars helped to obtain works. At the time of Pál Ráday (until 1733) collecting was concentrated on Transylvania where Mihály Szatmári Paksi, the teacher of theology and physics at Gyulafehérvár (today Alba Iulia) and Marosvásárhely was of great help. Gedeon Ráday extended the area of acquisitions. In Transylvania Hungarian works were collected by the Calvinist bishop, Sámuel Szilágyi; by Sámuel Zilai, a professor at Marosvásárhely; and also by Péter Bod, the "Hungarian Athenas", the maker of the first Hungarian encyclopaedia of writers. In the field of the natural sciences the collectors were: István Weszprémi, the noted physician (much praised by Morgagni in his famous work); Sámuel Nagy, who spent many years in Vienna and bought most of the medical works owned by Ráday; Mihály Tóth-Pápai, a priest and alchimist; and the already mentioned Mihály Szatmári Paksi, who provided him with books from Basle where he was studying. In Pest the books were acquired by Dániel Cornides, professor of history and heraldry at the university, while in Pozsony by Mátyás Bél, later by István Nagy. The wide-ranging correspondence of the Ráday family provides exact documentary evidence on the story of the acquisitions, as the agents enclosed the list of books on sale to their letters, Ráday marked the required books and sent the lists back. On the basis of these lists and the catalogues one can find out which books were bought by Ráday. A catalogue prepared after the death of Gedeon Ráday (1792) lists 4873 works in 10 302 volumes. The books were divided into 24 subjects, 16 represented the humanistic sciences (literature, philosophy, history, etc.), the bulk of the works was on theology, but there were five subjects which are of great importance both from the aspect of cultural history and of library history. These were: mathematics and tactics, political science, medicine, natural science and economics. Though the library had a general character, the above branches had great importance in view of the state of librarianship in Hungary. Gedeon Ráday was a scholar with a European outlook, he tried to provide facilities in his country for the developing branches of science even prior to the age of enlightement. He recognized that while the 18th century in general was still characterized by polymath thinking, the various branches of science including medicine showed considerable differentiation from the middle of the 17th century onwards, e. g. the sudden development of surgery, anatomy (in fact starting already in the renaissance),